Art Institute curators pick their favorite works

May 03, 2009

Rene Magritte: "Time Transfixed," 1938. For me, one of the most important works in the collection is Rene Magritte's "Time Transfixed," a realistically painted but thoroughly unrealistic image of a locomotive crashing through a fireplace. It's an icon and a surprising, magical image that will have fresh new context set against the wondrous backdrop of Millennium Park.

Stephanie D'Alessandro, curator of modern art, medieval to modern European painting and sculpture

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Bruce Nauman: "Clown Torture," 1987. "Clown Torture," which consists of two pairs of stacked monitors on pedestals and two large video projections in one darkened space, chronicles absurd misadventures. It marked a new direction in video installation in the mid-1980s and remains one of Nauman's most spectacular achievements.

Lisa Dorin, assistant curator of contemporary art

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Constantin Brancusi: "Golden Bird," 1919-20 (base circa 1922). With its sleek, soaring movement, inventive combination of different materials and exploration of modern, abstract form, "Golden Bird" exemplifies the achievement of the greatest sculptor of the early 20th Century. It also symbolizes Chicago's early receptivity to modern art, having featured in Brancusi's one-person exhibition of 1927 held at the Arts Club of Chicago and installed by legendary French artist-provocateur Marcel Duchamp.

Douglas Druick, curator and chair, medieval to modern European painting and sculpture

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Vija Celmins: "Explosion at Sea," 1966. After locating a wealth of printed material on World War II -- a conflict that was the backdrop of her childhood in Latvia -- Celmins employed subtle layers of precise brush strokes to construct a detailed image of a devastating attack on an aircraft carrier. The resulting painting -- one of the smallest works of art on view in the installation of the contemporary collection -- creates a disturbing contrast between the intimacy of the format and technique and the haunting seriousness of the theme.

James Rondeau, curator and chair, contemporary art

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Hernan Diaz Alonso: "Sur," Long Island City, N.Y., 2005. This work is inspired by art forms outside of architecture, in particular the film, sculpture and video work of contemporary artist Matthew Barney and the paintings of Francis Bacon. Diaz Alonso's monstrous constructions hover tantalizingly between the grotesque and the sublime, reintroducing an experimental notion into the discipline of architecture that blurs its boundaries with contemporary art practices.

Joseph Rosa, chair, architecture and design

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Marcia Lausen: "Design for Democracy: Ballot and Election Design," 2008. Following the infamous November 2000 "butterfly ballot" in Florida that confused voters during the presidential race, graphic designer Marcia Lausen set out to determine new guidelines for the U.S. voting process. This project is an excellent example of the way designers are able to take urgent problems and help transform them into objects that people can use in their everyday lives, helping to make complex information more understandable and visualizing new thinking that can have an enormous impact on the world.

Zoe Ryan, curator of design

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Steve Fitch: "Dinosaur, Highway 40, Vernal, Utah," 1974. In the first half of the 1970s, Steve Fitch crisscrossed the highways from Texas to California, attracted by the strangely prehistoric appearance of roadside signage and architecture, and of the great transport trucks that environment was built to serve. Fitch called the diesel trucks modern dinosaurs, and he loved the many actual dinosaur replicas used to get the attention of truckers and tourists.